


She's Going to Take Herself to See the Stars

by areyouarealmonster



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-30
Updated: 2014-10-30
Packaged: 2018-02-23 06:06:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2536952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/areyouarealmonster/pseuds/areyouarealmonster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor dies, and leaves Clara stranded.</p>
            </blockquote>





	She's Going to Take Herself to See the Stars

The Doctor dies. It’s not a grand death, with Daleks and Cybermen and all his enemies gathered together, but rather a gunshot. Followed by another gunshot. Lasers, or some such. Clara doesn’t really know. But she knows she’s stranded, on this planet, in this war. She yells at…whoever they’re fighting with to provide her with cover as she drags the Doctor back into the TARDIS and shuts the door behind her. And then she waits.

 

She waits for three days. Somehow, there’s a kitchen in the TARDIS. Somehow, she finds it. She thinks the TARDIS leads her there, but she can never be sure. That’s what she wants to think. She hopes the TARDIS likes her, but she’s never been sure.

 

So three days pass, and there’s nothing. No golden glow around the Doctor. Just a pool and a smear of blood. She thinks about disposing of the body. She thinks about the end of a grand alien race. She thinks about home.

 

She cries, of course. The Doctor was her best friend, and she did love him. However she loved him, whichever way, she could never decide. It doesn’t matter now, though. Now there’s just this. An empty shell. A body. A body that had seen thousands of years, thousands of planets, millions of stars. Billions?

 

Clara knows she has to get back. Whatever had been going on outside had quieted down by the end of the third day, and nobody had been able to get inside the TARDIS. She had heard them trying. The TARDIS protects her, and she’s grateful for it.

 

She gets up from where she had been curled up on the floor next to the Doctor (no, next to the body), on pillows that had just appeared one night. She had said “thank you” to the TARDIS. There had been no reply.

 

The lights on the console blink steadily. Or erratically; once she thinks she’s got the pattern of the blinking down, it seems to change. She wishes she had watched exactly what the Doctor did when he flew the TARDIS. All the knobs and levers and buttons look the same to her. Nothing, of course, is labeled. She pushes a button experimentally. A loud screeching noise blares out, and she presses the button again quickly. The noise stops.

 

Clara wonders if there’s a manual. Clara wonders if there’s a library. She’s been through the bowels of the TARDIS but never really explored what rooms were contained within the ship. If she’s going to die out here anyway, there’s nothing to be afraid of within the ship. If she’s going to die anyway, she might as well be productive.

 

She moves through the hallways, a ghost. She hears noises. Whispers, creaks, the ship expanding and compressing with each breath. The Doctor always told her that the TARDIS was a living, breathing creature. She didn’t quite believe him. Now she feels her breathing sync up with each breath the TARDIS takes.

 

She finds the library, after opening every door she passed for an hour or so. She supposes it could have gone faster if she’d asked, but she wants to do this on her own. She wants to show the TARDIS she’s willing to learn, willing to do what needs to be done. Or she’s just stubborn, and this is a waste of time. Regardless, she flips through every book. Hours pass, maybe days. She wanders back and forth between the library and the kitchen. The distance between them seems to get shorter every day. New foods appear in the fridge, in the cabinets. She doesn’t think about where they come from.

 

She reads. She reads about subjects she can’t comprehend, advanced physics that don’t exist on this plane, foreign fruits that would probably kill her if she ate them, and aliens. Books upon books of species and types and families and home worlds. She thinks she could read for a thousand years and never know even one millionth of what’s out there. She thinks she could travel forever and see the stars, if only she could figure out how to fly the TARDIS.

 

There’s no manual. Maybe there never has been. Or maybe the Doctor didn’t need it and he threw it out of the TARDIS in a fit of hubris. Clara thinks it’s the second option. She thinks the TARDIS agrees with her when she ponders it out loud. She talks to the TARDIS now, and it’s like talking to yourself but at the same time completely different, because the TARDIS listens and the TARDIS responds. Not with words, but with shifts and with whispers and with little puffs of air out of the vents. Clara thinks they have a good rapport going.

 

Clara refuses to give up on the manual idea. “If it’s not in the library,” she thinks (out loud), “maybe it’s somewhere else. Maybe it’s in his room.” She waits. She’s never seen where the Doctor slept, doesn’t even know if he had a room like people have rooms. Places where they go to sleep, to get away from the world. Maybe the whole TARDIS was his room. The ship shifts around her. She walks out of the library.

 

The hallway looks the same, except there’s a door at the end where there hadn’t been a door, or an end, before. Clara walks up, and puts her hand on the door. It’s warm. She twists the knob and it opens with a loud creak. The first thing she notices is color. Reds and blues and greens and browns and oranges and purples go on and on past the point where she can see. Her eyes adjust, and she realizes it’s a room full of clothes. Clothes in all shapes and sizes and colors and styles. She’s overwhelmed by the sheer amount, but she wades in anyway. Some have been hung up, others still are in piles on the floor. She catches sight of a striped scarf, winding through multiple stacks. Her eyes fall on a dark tweed suit, thrown on top of a pile like debris. Her eyes well up with tears, and she pushes on.

 

As she moves on, she notices that the clothes are getting smaller. The styles are getting different. There are skirts. She stops. She goes back. She pulls out a pair of polka dot black and white pants. She pulls out a cream button down with ruffles. She pulls out a deep maroon blazer. She pulls out black ankle boots. She looks around, and finds a fresh bra in her size, the softest panties she’s ever worn, and plush black socks that come up to right where she needs them to be comfortable in the boots. Dressed in her new clothes, she takes one final look around and her eyes fall on a thin headband. It’s covered in a soft cloth with a pattern of stars and galaxies and the more she looks at it, the more she realizes that the pattern is constantly shifting, showing different stars and different galaxies. She puts it on. She walks out.

 

For the first time in what must be weeks, she enters the console room. The Doctor’s body is gone. She’s not surprised. She knows this is a different console room than the one she was in before. She doesn’t know how she knows that, because it looks exactly the same. Except for the missing body. But she knows it like she knows how to breathe, like she knows how to blink. She steps up to the console and pulls a lever. Doesn’t even think about it, just pulls a lever and then twists a knob and pushes a button and runs to the other side of the console and types a string of numbers and then slaps a big red button with her palm. The TARDIS wheezes to life. She flips up another lever and the TARDIS roars into the time vortex.

 

Without even thinking about it, Clara is home. She steps out onto her street, and nothing looks the same. Everything is brighter and darker and she can see threads connecting everything and everyone and she grins, she grins so wide that she can’t contain it anymore and she cries out and she spins around and she laughs. She laughs and laughs and she doesn’t stop until she’s crying, on the sidewalk, with crowds of people milling around her. She cries for the friend she lost, and she cries for the life she lost because now she knows she can never go back. She can never go back to the school and be a teacher and live her life day by day. She can never stand in front of a class every day, she can never go back to her apartment and read a book and dream.

 

She’s the last of the Time Lords and she doesn’t think she’s got forever, but she’s got long enough and she’s going to take herself to see the stars.


End file.
